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Photographing Fireworks this 4th of July

It’s that time of year again to practice your fireworks photography. I wrote a post last year with tips; you can read “how to photograph fireworks” here. I won’t rehash the topic, but I did want to add a few points.

First, if you have a point-and-shoot, you should have a “fireworks” setting. I can’t really vouch for it and I still wouldn’t trust it hand-held; but it’s worth a shot.

Secondly, I said that your lens should “go to infinity” on its own. If you don’t know what that means and you have your lens on auto focus, your lens may try to hunt for focus in low light conditions. If it can’t find an area of contrast, it won’t be able to lock focus. Bright fireworks against a dark sky should do the trick, but if your focusing distance is off, your results may not be as sharp as it could be. So here’s what you do. Look at your lens and you should see a focus window:

The window tells you how much of your image will be in focus in meters and in feet. In the image above, for example, you can see the lens is set to infinity. That means anything from the lens to infinity will be in focus. If it had been at 3-meters; only anything up to 10-feet would be in focus. So the best bet is to set your lens to manual focus and set the focusing distance to infinity. Just don’t forget to switch it back to auto focus before your next shoot.

One last tip: Try to give your fireworks images some context. The shot at the top of this post and last year’s just show fireworks in the night sky. This year, I am going to try to show the fireworks in relation to the surroundings. If you can find some building or landmark to put in the foreground or bottom part of your image, it will help convey more information.

Good luck and Happy 4th of July!

[UPDATE: I just shot some fireworks this evening and my shutter speed was between 15-to-30 seconds. I think this is because I zoomed out to show some context. In the past I zoomed in on the fireworks like the image above so it didn’t matter if the sky goes black. As you can see in the image below, it was still twilight and I didn’t want the sky to go black.]